Asus introduces its pre-draft 802.11AC router: the RT-AC66U. It’s the only pre-draft 11AC router so far, to utilize external antennas, a plus for range, because the RT-AC66U sustained the best throughput at distance than any other pre-draft 11AC routers tested to date. This powerful router also offers one of the most well-designed user interfaces among the current crop of 11ac routers. The RT-AC66U is not without a few quirks, mainly restricted to the software, but excellent throughput and range, plus advanced features lacking often in consumer-grade routers, is sure to endear this device to more hard-core wireless networking geeks and small business.

SpecsThe RT-AC66U is a beauty of a router, despite the three unwieldy-looking external antennas that attach. The casing has a decorative diamond-shaped pattern and Asus' branding in a classy painted gold on the top. Also on the top near the edge are nine tiny LEDs displaying connection status for the WAN and LAN ports, power, each wireless band, and USB device connections. When a connection is active and stable, the LEDs shine a solid blue.

The rear panel has four Gigabit LAN ports and a WAN port and two USB 2.0 ports that can support not only USB external drives, but printers and 3G/4G mobile broadband devices that can be used for connection failover.

This dual-band router supports up to 450 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and up to 1300 Mbps on the 5 GHz band. The RT-AC66U uses a Broadcom wireless controller.

SetupThe RT-AC66U employs what I like to call a traditional router setup. Increasingly, consumer routers are tailored to be set up by those with no to little technical experience such as the Cisco Linksys EA6500. Many of these super-easy-to-setup routers can also be set up wirelessly.

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Not so with the RT-AC66U. This router is setup using a wired connection from a computer to one of the LAN ports on the router. A CD ships with the device. Contents include a user manual and utilities such as a router setup wizard.

The easiest way to get the router setup though, is to follow the directions on the accompanying Quick Start Guide. The guide shows how to best position the router for optimal signal strength, how to mount it to the stand that also ships with the router (the RT-Ac66U's documentation states that operating the router in an upright position on its stand yields the best wireless signal), and how to connect cables.

Once a computer is connected to the LAN port and the router is on, users can open a browser and the router's setup page is automatically opened. The Quick Internet Setup Wizard walks you through the setup process.

Set up steps are pretty routine. First, set a password to access the router's interface under the admin account. The router then detects the WAN connection (in my case my DSL connection was correctly identified). Set up concludes with assigning a password for each wireless band. The interface has a nice feature in which you click a checkbox to copy over settings for the 2.4 GHz band—such as encryption level, SSID, etc.—to the 5 GHz band, saving some typing time.

There isn't a lot of configuration you need to do if you don't want because the router automatically sets the SSIDs and the encryption level to WPA2 Personal with AES encryption.

Set up of the RT-AC66U was virtually pain-free. I encountered one quirk performing a firmware update. The router software instantly detected a newer version of firmware available, and I followed the steps to download and apply the new version.

The router was shipped to me at firmware version 3.0.0.4_246. The interface, after detecting a newer version of software, correctly displayed the current version, but identified the new version as "undefined.undefined.undefined_260" appearing as though it was having issues correctly identifying the new version of firmware (which is 3.0.0.4.260).

Despite the weird display of the new firmware version, I went ahead with the upgrade. A status bar appeared on-screen along with the message to wait about three minutes for the update to complete. I never saw any progress on the status bar. After about three minutes, the page remained the same with no progress in the bar, except at this point, I received a prompt to login back into the router.

When I logged back in, the screen was still in the firmware upgrade area of the interface except now I had a message, "Router's current firmware is the latest version." So I had no idea if the firmware upgrade took place or not.

It had. Going into the router's status page I did see the firmware being reported as the latest version. The automatic firmware upgrade process was messy. On a second RT-AC66U router that Asus sent to use as a bridge to test 11ac, I instead did the upgrade manually which was without incident. Still, it's convenient to have the router be able to detect and perform the firmware upgrade automatically so hopefully that's something that will get worked out in a future update.

I also noticed some sluggishness changing through different pages in the interface whether I was accessing via Internet Explorer or Firefox. There was also an issue once or twice where devices connected to the router could not access the Internet. The issue was only resolved with a router reboot. It seems another firmware update may be in order.

Samara Lynn has nearly twenty years experience in Information Technology; most recently as IT Director at a major New York City healthcare facility. She has a Bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, several technology certifications, and...

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